An American Love Story (15 page)

He grabbed her in his arms and held her immobile. She couldn’t even wiggle. “What should I do with you?” he said, his eyes gleaming mischievously. His face was very close to hers.

She looked into his eyes and didn’t say anything.

“A terrible punishment …” he said.

She was finding it difficult to breathe, and not because he was holding her too tightly, just because he was holding her at all. He didn’t seem to be breathing much either. Then she felt the lump against her stomach; his erection. Power and desire swept through her. She could still control him! Quickly he bent his head and kissed her on the mouth.

His lips felt just as she had imagined and dreamed they would, only better. She felt herself melting, and kissed him back. They stood there for a while, kissing, and then tentatively, almost scared, Simon opened his mouth. Bambi opened hers. Their tongues touched. His erection was like a rock. She wondered what something that big and hard would feel like inside her and in answer there was a throbbing between her legs. He wasn’t clutching her anymore like his prisoner, he had his arms around her firmly but gently, and she put her arms around his neck. They investigated tongues for a while.

“Oh, God,” Bambi sighed.

“Mmm …”

She rubbed her body very subtly against his erection, just enough so he could feel it. He moved away.

“What?” she said.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“What you did.”

“Why not?” she asked, afraid that she had gone too far and scared him.

“Because I’ll lose control,” Simon said.

She smiled at him and he smiled back. He was her Simon and not her Simon; an adult and a child. Her best friend, her partner, and someday her lover: her great and glorious toy. “That might be very nice,” she whispered.

“But not just for me,” he said softly. “I want it to be the same for you.”

“Me too,” she said.

He squeezed his face together in an expression of agony and let go of her. “Think of something horrible, think of something horrible, think of something horrible,” he repeated to himself like a mantra.

“What are you doing?”

“Whew,” he said, finally.

“What?”

“I’m okay now,” Simon said.

“Did you … uh?” She wanted to know what he was doing with
her
dick.

“No. That was the point.”

She shrugged. It was a no-win situation; either way wasn’t very romantic. He looked down at her as if reading her thoughts, and then he took her in his arms. “Bambi,” he said, “would you mind if I were madly in love with you?”

Her heart turned over, if a heart could do that. “Are you?”

“Yes,” he said.

She pretended to look stern, to tease him. Then she smiled. “You’d better be,” she said, “Because I’m madly in love with you.”

They held each other, hugging. “I’m so happy,” Simon said.

“Me too.”

They heard the front door open and they both jumped apart. It was her mother. Silently and quickly, as if they had been conspirators forever, Bambi and Simon ran upstairs to her virginal room. They had spent their childhood afternoons in that room, and if they were careful her mother would never know that things had changed. Bambi locked the door and she and Simon lay on the
bed. Hearts pounding, they held and stroked each other, kissing, touching with the amazed fascination of the first time either of them had ever touched someone in that way. Then he was sucking her nipples, and she felt the ecstasy radiating through her whole body.

He lifted his head. “You’re torturing me,” he whispered.

“You’re torturing me too. Don’t stop.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Shh …”

“I can’t stand this,” he whispered. “My parents won’t give me a car until I go to college. We’re stuck here.”

“They’re not here so much,” Bambi breathed. She kept him tightly in her arms. “Forget them.” The danger of her mother’s presence downstairs, of their possible discovery, gave their passion an edge; she was stunned by the power of her sexual feelings. They kissed and touched and investigated further. She was wet between her legs now, and the throbbing was unbearable. He had his fingers inside her, and she clamped down on them, pushing and rubbing, feeling her body beginning to melt and disappear.

“Oh, just hold it,” he whispered. “Please …” He unzipped his jeans and his erect penis sprang out, gleaming faintly white in the twilight dimness of her room. So
that
was what it looked like! She put her hand around it. He trembled and groaned, and then he grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her night table and pressed them to himself, and came in them.

He looked a little embarrassed. “I wish we had a place to go,” he said. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too.” She adjusted her clothes. “Are we going to be lovers?”

“We
are
lovers,” Simon said.

“I mean go to bed.”

“Do you want to?”

She thought about it. She wasn’t even really sixteen yet, and in a way she was scared. “Maybe it’s too soon,” she said.

“I think it is,” Simon said. “We’ll make love—there are lots of things we can do—but I don’t think we should consummate this until we go to college.”

“College?”

“I’ve been thinking … we have to go to the same college. We’ll live together there. We’ll have our own room, our own bed. We’ll have privacy.”

She had to admire him. “Simon, you’re so organized. But what if we don’t get into the same college?”

“We will.”

“And what if we keep tormenting each other and we can’t wait?”

“We’ll worry about that when the time comes. Besides, I’m very determined when I make my mind up.”

“So am I,” Bambi said impishly.

They held each other lovingly, running their fingers lightly over each other’s skin. “Now we have another secret,” he said.

Almost their entire class came to Bambi’s Sweet Sixteen party, even some of the people she had never spoken to. She was floating on air, and Simon was glowing because he had guessed right. Bambi had made a list of what songs Cousin Al was and was not allowed to play. Someone poured a bottle of vodka into the punch. There were colored paper lanterns in the trees, and it was very romantic. Bambi and Simon in white, she in her cherished lace dress, danced together as much as they could, whenever one of the other boys didn’t cut in. It was her night. She was pretty, she was popular, and she was a star. And she was loved by the boy she was in love with. Which was the best thing of all, the two of them, or being the star? It didn’t matter; she didn’t have to decide, or even think about it. Tonight she had everything.

10

1970—NEW YORK

E
ver since Susan came back to New York that summer of ’69, she knew she had changed. Her friends were changing too: marrying, having children, moving away, chasing their careers to Hollywood. They were all survivors, as she was; hurt, determined, and wary; struggling, always looking for the lucky deal, the better romance, and then turning innocent again, believing this time it would be different. Except for Dana, they were people who came in and out of her life, very glad to see her again but never really keeping up, and she sometimes wondered if she’d really had that many close friends to begin with. A phone call after a year brought them together ready to have a good time as if it had been yesterday, but everyone she knew had their own battles: career and love, drugs and alcohol. Nobody
she
knew wanted to save the world; they just wanted to survive it.

The isolation that had pursued her for most of her life had returned; the only thing that kept her functioning was
writing. She wrote some essays about modern loneliness for the women’s magazines. Would it be different if she worked in an office, had people to see every day? Free-lancing was a rotten job, and she wondered why she had chosen it.

She was still the Susan who could walk into a party and find a man to take home, but she didn’t want that anymore. She was going to be twenty-nine, only another year before thirty. A woman of thirty should be married, or at least settle down. She knew that no matter how hard she tried, marriage was not what she wanted. She thought of all the things that marriage had always meant to her: being trapped, not being understood, being told what to do, being prevented from writing except as a hobby. Any boy her mother had liked would be, as a husband, her mother’s little puppet; her father went along with everything her mother wanted just to keep peace, so marriage would mean being dominated through a whole chain of command. But even though she was afraid of marriage she needed a sane, mature man to love, to love her; someone she could rely on. Was that too much to ask for?

A movie star she’d had a brief affair with came to see her, bringing fried chicken from the Kentucky Colonel and a bunch of flowers. He was in town for a few days and wanted to go to bed again. She told him it was too late for them, that they should be friends. He took it calmly and they ate the chicken and then he went away. He called her once after that, to ask if she knew an apartment his ex-wife could sublet. Susan supposed that was what friends were for.

Another man, whom she’d once considered very sexy and glamorous, came in from London and invited her for a drink at his hotel. They sat in the bar and drank champagne, and then he asked her to come upstairs. She looked at him and felt nothing. She explained that her work was giving her so much concern that she simply couldn’t think about sex at all. He understood, and went upstairs alone. She didn’t hear from him again.

At night she watched television:
Mission: Impossible
,
The Carol Burnett Show
,
Marcus Welby
,
That Girl
. “That girl” was still a virgin even though her boyfriend was around all the time. Apparently having her own apartment (without the boyfriend) was daring
enough for TV viewers. Susan wondered what kind of mind could perpetrate such nonsense on adults. Any woman old enough to wear false eyelashes that looked like skunks was old enough to sleep with someone. But television watching was hypnotic and comforting.
It
was something you could rely on.

That Christmas Susan and her friend Jeffrey, who was also a free-lance writer, and who was gay and presently unattached, went with a few other waifs and strays to Jeffrey’s parents’ unused house in the country. They bought a tree and a lot of evergreen to drape around, and spent Christmas Eve decorating. Overnight it snowed, over a foot of beautiful feathery white powder. They tramped in it for a few minutes until they got cold, and then went back to roast a turkey and distribute presents. Why can’t it always be like this, Susan thought; this feeling of family and warmth? She called Dana in California to wish her Merry Christmas, and they shrieked “Bah humbug!” at each other.

“Come home,” Susan said. “We have snow.”

“Come out here,” Dana said. “We have plastic reindeer leaping across Rodeo Drive between the palm trees. It’s eighty degrees.”

They talked for a while about how unhappy they were and hung up. She felt both better and worse.

Things were quiet in New York after the holidays. Susan had money left from her ill-fated movie sale and had her apartment painted white, and bought pale linen slipcovers and plants. It was a really nice little place for the rent, and she liked the way it now looked, but sometimes she thought in terror that it would be the only apartment she would ever live in, that she would grow old and die there, looking at the same ceiling over her bed until it became her deathbed.

Jeffrey called and she told him what she had been thinking. “For what you’re paying I would want to die there,” he said. “I put your name on a list for a press party. It’s at Pavilion, for a TV movie starring Sylvia Polydor. You remember her, the femme fatale from the Forties. Now she’s reduced to doing TV, and it’s a big coup for them. I can’t go, but it sounds like a good party. You should go. Maybe you’ll meet a man.”

“I don’t want to go without you,” Susan said.

“Force yourself.”

“I used to think this kind of thing was fun, but now I’m beginning to see it as bizarre. Forcing oneself to go to parties to hunt.”

“Well, you could just sit in your apartment and wait for the window washer to fall in.”

She laughed and took down the details.

On her way there in the cab she thought of turning back. She almost told the driver to stop but then talked herself out of it. She would go, have a drink, the free food was bound to be great, and maybe she’d even find something to write an article about. RBS, who was giving the party, had a lot of shows.

Pavilion was brightly lit, very French, very elegant, and jammed. Men in dark suits were standing in clumps, talking. A lot of people knew each other, and the few who didn’t were hovering by the food, pretending that was why they were there. Susan fought her way to the bar and got a glass of wine, and then looked around.

There was Sylvia Polydor, much shorter than she seemed onscreen, with her customary entourage of press agent, manager, bodyguard, and gay hairdresser/date. People were pushing and photographers were taking pictures like crazy. There was also a man with his arm lightly around her, who seemed to be in a position of authority because everything he said made everyone laugh. He was just under six feet tall, lean and well dressed, maybe forty. He wasn’t at all conventionally handsome, but he seemed golden, his fairish hair, the way his smile lit up his whole face and made Susan want to know him. His eyes were round and boyish, flecked with green and silver, watching. He was entertaining them, but all that jolliness was surface; she felt he could do it in his sleep. The rest of him was aware of everything that was happening in the room, even of her. Susan kept looking at him. It gave her so much pleasure to watch him that without giving it a second thought she grinned at him.